I've always loved this one:

I worked for an AntiVirus company that shall remain nameless. I had my wallet tied to what percent of my cases were inside the Service Level Agreement (SLA). Calculated daily and averaged over the quarter and paid out... Good Idea, Yes?

Well the daily number was calculated as #cases outside the SLA/#Cases

What becomes interesting is the company really wanted to influence that first number, However, being that there just are long running cases - the second number is really what is important. If an easy case came in that would take an hour to solve for the customer - it was in my best interest to put a note on my calendar for the last day of the SLA and give the solution to the customer then

Couldn't convince the VP that the math was wrong for the behavior he wanted, oh well

Is he really paid in bitcoin, as in .1 btc per pay period (or whatever is appropriate) or is he paid salary/price of btc today = ?btc on payday.

The former is really paid in bitcoin. The other is like me saying I am paid in company stock and mutual funds because on payday I get a deduction from my paycheck that goes to buy company stock and mutual funds. If the mayor is simply taking BTC as the payment for a fixed number of dollars - there is no difference in that than having your paycheck deposited into coindesk and buying btc after the check clears.

So in other words give the poor a dollar and no wealth is created. In the mean time - a wealthy person removes a job from the economy.

I noticed that as well. A complicated math analysis and the summary can't even get 76%~3/4 rather than 2/3. I would grant them 3/4 not that far off. Now I instinctively don't trust anything without seeing the data

I hate when my prescription medicine goes "Over the Counter". Yes - don't need to see a doctor once a year to renew the prescription, and the cost of the actual medication actually goes down

BUT

The actual cost to my pocket goes way up. So my allergy medicine was 20 bucks for a 3 month supply - delivered automatically to my house. Easy Peasy. Now it is 20 bucks for a month, and I have to remember to pick it up at the grocery store before I run out.

Dang it, just ran out today.

The company may not consider it a part of my paid "work time" but I sure do. I have changed jobs because the commute removed 1/2 hour off of my daily commute. You would be crazy to not consider the time it takes to get to work as a part of your "business" day. If you didn't why wouldn't you live 3-4 hours away from your bay area commute where you can actually afford housing.

Second Quarter Intel Financials

Ok, 57% for the whole company, this is low - historically it is in the mid to low 60s. It is known that DCG (Xeon) operates at higher gross margins than the client computing group (it also has higher expenses vs the total revenue so operating margin is about the same)

You are probably thinking of something like Dell that operates at a few % net margin like you are thinking - Dell has almost no RnD budget and can get away with> that.

Just for the record. AMD has a 45.71% Gross Margin , Nvidia has 64.8% Gross Margin and Xilinx has 66.7% so Intel isn't hitting it out of the ballpark

Intel would have to cut prices A LOT before it would be considered dumping. Xeon gets somewhere around 80% gross margin, and dumping implies you are selling at a loss to kill competition - it is perfectly acceptable to be the low cost manufacturer and sell your products for less than your competitor does. If anything I believe Intel still holds a higher gross margin over AMD - so Intel could drop their costs to simply match AMD

Was looking at a new Dell server in June (very end of the month). I was looking at a delivery date in late October for an AMD server, I could have the Intel in my hands mid July, 2 weeks

No AMD won't lower prices, they are selling everything they can make - Intel has to make this move, or they will have spare capacity - which is very bad in manufacturing

So I had an ongoing debate with a manager. There would be a bug deferral procedure before a product shipped. In it any bug could be deferred to the next release, including show stopper bugs. I claimed that a show stopper bug should be degraded to a high or medium priority bug if we shipped with it. After all, we didn't stop the show. His argument was management was making an informed decision on the business impact, not the severity of the bug. Was a fun ongoing argument either way

Is this the dumbest idea ever?

So companies generate profit. There are 3 things they can do with it. Invest it, Give it to the owners (pay a dividend), Buy back shares

You want to remove 1 of those ways of returning money to shareholders - why? It is one of the most tax efficient ways of returning money to your shareholders...
Oh wait, I just got it - you want more of my money in taxes don't you

So you get rid of method 3, then a company can invest internally, not really effective at a huge scale, it can buy something external - currently becoming more difficult at the multi-billion scale, or let their cash pile grow

Do you really want these companies amassing huge amounts of cash that just sit and have no useful purpose?

So I had a simple metrics... % of time my support cases were in Service Level Agreement. If I had 10 cases and 1 was out - I met my SLA 90% of the time...

There are always long standing bugs that take forever to fix so there is always something out of SLA - nothing can be done about it. What was perverse is my wallet was tied to this metric. If an easy fix came in that had a 2 week SLA - it was against my best interest to fix it immediately. I mean I have 10 cases with 1 bad - now I fix one I now have 9 cases with one bad... My metric went from 90% to 89%. I lose money. Tried to explain this to management - they didn't get it... so off I go to give customers fixes right on the due date, instead of when they are available to keep as many cases open as possible.

Got to love simple metrics.

Just wondering why it took 2 years to fire him for violations of the drug policy...

That said most likely - they didn't like him as CEO anymore and looked back on his record to find something that could be used to justify firing him. Easier to say drug addict than simply - is not meeting expectations

If by making remarkable progress you mean they are getting very good at blowing up spaceships -- I agree.
Nothing about this is progress - you engineer a solution to work and test that it works. What SpaceX appears to be doing is throwing spaghetti against the wall to see if a launch finally sticks a landing. This is hacking not engineering - you should know what you are doing before launch and have the launch do what you planned. I hope they launch on the 4th of July... that will probably be the first launch that was planned to explode that doesn't